In Part One of our New Years Resolution prep, we focused on how our internal mindset and personal identity can affect change. This week we start down the road of the external. The most important external factor is our immediate environment. How we control and interact with the things readily accessible to us can have drastic effects on breaking bad habits and establishing new ones.

The Self-Discipline Fallacy

Every night before bed, I put a glass of water and my journal on my bedside table, I make a protein shake and put it on the dresser, clean off the yoga matt directly next to my bed, and finally, I lay out all of my gym clothes.

The next morning I wake up, drink the water, write in my journal, do some light stretching, get some protein in me, put on my clothes, and I’m out the door for the gym in 15 minutes, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. All of these steps have been put in place the night before to make sure that the untrustworthy and sleepy future Owen has the most streamlined path to a perfect morning.

Before I started to put these things into place, I would wake up and stumble my way through the morning, finally trodding my way to the gym 40 or 50 minutes later, if at all, my mind still restless and confused. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t convince myself to get up and get started.

It took me years of horrific, sluggish mornings to realize something that no one wants to hear.

Willpower is overrated.

You see, I believed, like most people, that the best solution to becoming a better person was to work harder. I felt, through the power of psychological discipline, I could whip myself into shape. But as any food addict or social media fiend can tell you, it’s just not that easy.

The problem is that we often think of self-discipline as an overarching conceptual engine. An internal mantra, magically generating motivation and consistency. In practice, however, willpower better serves a resolution in motion. Discipline can help to fuel the fire but is almost useless without a decent starter and the right conditions.

It turned out that creating a smooth and streamlined environment, like a path of crumbs, gave morning me a no-brainer path to follow to a successful start.

The truth is that we don’t need to rely so much on self-discipline. The best way to ensure success is to make positive outcomes convenient simple while making adverse decisions near impossible. We can’t guarantee what or how our future selves will react or feel when it comes time to make an important step, but we can guide them through carefully creating guidelines around us. By shaping our environment through strategic tension and relief, we can guide our future selves to better and healthier decisions.

Tension

By applying positive tension in the way of bad habits, we can generate an environment where making bad decisions is almost impossible. Although tough at first, the goal is to change the way we relate to our bad habits and the things that trigger them.

The process of generating tension begins with observation. Take a week to think and meditate on what triggers and sustains the bad habits you are looking to overcome. Then, believe about ways you can circumvent or put up roadblocks restricting access to those triggers or patterns.

If driving by the pizza joint on the way home triggers you to buy a slice, try driving another route home.

If tempted by junk food around the house, throw it out, make it impossible to get without going to the store.

If you spend too much time on social media, interrupting dinner dates and family outings, put a content blocker on your phone, and give your friend or partner the password.

By strategically creating tension in channels of negative patterns, we can slowly start to break our relationship with them.

These practices may sound life self-flagellation, but that’s not the idea. The idea here is to start to change the way we think about our addictions and bad habits. By applying tension in the right areas, we begin to change our mindset. These practices don’t need to last forever, and they aren’t cure-alls either. However, when in place for long enough, we break the hold that our patterns have over us, we begin to see the potential of a life without them. In this way, we take the pressure off of self-discipline as a central force. Instead, our willpower can begin to passively maintain the positive mindset and lifestyle we develop when the conditions are in our favor.

Relief

Now that we understand the potential for tension as a tool, we can flip it on its head. By relieving the areas of negative tension, we can facilitate the conditions for positive habit development.

Let’s return to the example of my morning practices. One of the habits I knew I wanted to establish was stretching first thing in the morning. It seems simple enough. What I found, however, was that the idea of getting out the yoga matt, making space, and getting around to stretching first thing in the morning felt like the most daunting task from the comfort of my bed. It was a roadblock keeping me from a positive habit.

So I flipped the tension on its head to try and relieve it. Now my yoga matt stays rolled out next to my bed at all times. I can roll out of my bed directly onto the matt. A little less daunting and a little easier to accomplish.

Though simple in practice, applying this relief can make seemingly tricky tasks reasonably simple. The more we can automate the paths to positive habits, the better chance we have of doing them with consistency.

If you want to journal every day, keep your journal next to your phone charger or your alarm clock, reminding you to write every night or morning.

If you want to become a better photographer, keep your camera on you at all times. Chances are you’ll miss some great shots if you only take it out with you when you think you need it.

The more readily available and easily accessible good habits are, the more inclined we will be to do them complete them but also to feel excited about them.

Moving Forward

Using our tools of tension and relief, we can shape our environment to create perfect conditions for success and consistency. Informed by our intrinsic identity, these tools begin to form our external world and motivations in our favor.